The Animal Wife (42 page)

"Wait, Uncle!" I called. "Stop!" But I was too late.

Andriki's eyes flew wide and his mouth fell open, so that his ax clattered down over the rocks. His hands flew to his chest and throat; he fell backward to the ground with a dull thump. On the pine needles far below, he lay still. I leaped from the cave and landed on my feet beside him, then knelt, moved his hands aside, and yanked out the things that were sticking in him—two things, two bone-tipped things now red with his blood, one from his throat and one from his heart. Two weak, thin little bird-spears.

"They killed me," sighed Andriki.

"No, Uncle!" I cried. But he was right. They did.

***

"Uncle!" I shouted, and "Ohun help him!" But Andriki was watching the Camps of the Spirits—his pupils glazed and his eyelids relaxed in a look I had seen many times before, if not on a person. He was dead.

Then I felt a terrible anger, and a red light filled the corners of my eyes. How had this happened? The Ilasi had killed him with their tiny spears, which somehow they had gotten deep inside him, although the spears were light as grass and both of them together snapped in two as I held them. I dropped the pieces and snatched up my spear, shouting that I too would die that day while killing Ilasi. Looking up at the people on the ledge, although bird-spears seemed to be flying by like bees, I chose a man, balanced my spear, and reached backward to launch it.

Suddenly I was knocked flat on my back. On top of me, pressing me to the ground, soft and heavy in a cloud of hair and breath, her eyes huge, her face heating mine, lay Muskrat. Inside her eyes I saw her pupils widening; inside her mouth I saw her white, wet teeth and pink tongue. "Stop now," she said, in my language.

Above her people were gathering. Men began to take her by the arms and clothing and try to pull her to her feet. But she wrapped her arms and legs around me and buried her face in my neck, holding me so tightly that when the people tried to lift her, I felt myself rising. Meanwhile she was shouting past my ear a stream of her own language.

I tried to free myself. A baby was crying, I noticed as I struggled with Muskrat—our baby, who sat in his sling astride the hip of a little girl. She stood nearby, her eyes on Muskrat, her face filled with fear, and her arms around the baby as if she would protect him. Both Muskrat and I turned our heads to look at her. Then one of the Ilasi men said something that sounded strong and definite, and Muskrat let go of me and got up. Hie next moment she was sitting on her heels beside me, her shirt open, our child at her breast. "Ah! Weh!" she called to Pinesinger, beckoning with her thumb.

Badly frightened, Pinesinger came forward, unable to take her eyes from Andriki, who lay on his back, very still. Muskrat waited. When Pinesinger was near, Muskrat spoke to her briefly. I listened. Everyone listened. In the quiet, warm air of early fall, Muskrat's voice made the only sound except for the pulsing cry of locusts and the droning of the first few flies to learn about Andriki. Behind me in the woods the wind breathed in the pines, and high above the ridge of the hills, in the dazzle of sunlight, another hawk followed the path in the air that took him south.

"She says this," said Pinesinger, her voice trembling. "You may go. Your woman won't go with you. She wants to stay here. Do you see that girl?" Pinesinger pointed with her lips at the little girl who had been holding the baby, surely the girl whose footprints had so closely followed Muskrat's. "She's Muskrat's daughter. Do you see that man?" Pinesinger pointed with her lips at a broad-shouldered, bearded man, the man who had spoken so angrily to me in the cave and who seemed in the daylight to be almost the age of Father. "He's her husband. Do you see that woman?" Pinesinger pointed with her lips at an elderly woman from whose wrinkled face the blue buttocks mark had almost faded. "She's her mother. Do you see that elder?" Pinesinger pointed to the old man with the staff. "He's her father. Her people wouldn't let her go even if she agreed. But she says she doesn't know why you followed her, since she never wanted to stay with you."

What could I say? My thoughts wouldn't come. I waited. Muskrat spoke again, and sometimes one or another of her people added a quiet word or two. The people were very calm now. Their voices were low and reasoned, and their gestures and faces were serene. "Muskrat says you can go," said Pinesinger. "For the sake of your child here, Kiu Ngaar, her people agree not to kill you if you go now. I think you should do it. Just stand up and go."

"I can't leave my uncle. I must bury him."

Muskrat and some of the Ilasi men spoke together for a little while, and at last Pinesinger said, "They don't like it that we bury dead people. It isn't the right thing to do, they say. It's a bad practice, not safe, because of the corpse. If you want to bury your uncle's corpse, you must take it away."

"If I don't?"

This time Muskrat answered. "Is all right you leave him," she said to me gently. "He you uncle. We pull him in woods. Then we clean our hand, where we touch him. Soon he gone."

"I'll take him," I said. I got up then and stood over Andriki, looking down at his half-open eyes. "Forgive me," I said to his spirit, which might still have been near us, waiting in the air for a bird to guide it to the sun's place in the west. I hope he heard me. I won't see him in the Camps of the Spirits. He'll wait for Maral at their mother's fire, while I will go to Uncle Bala and my mother. The lineage claims us in the Camps of the Spirits, where women own all of us, living and dead.

I took Andriki's right wrist, already cold, the flesh stiffening. Pulling him up, I knelt so that my shoulder fitted to his belly. Then I stood, with him riding my shoulder; bringing his cooling arm around my back, I clasped it and his legs against me. Pinesinger handed me his spear, then mine, then his hunting bag, then mine. I looked around at Muskrat. She stood nearby, with our baby in his sling on her back, her hands on her daughter's shoulders, and her eyes on her husband's face, listening intently as he spoke to someone else. But my little boy was watching me. He raised his head from his mother's back and looked at me closely with his dark, knowing eyes. For a moment we watched each other. His face became suddenly anxious, as if he knew something wrong was happening. Very sad, I nodded to him. "May you have life," I said to him, and turning, I walked away.

***

Soon I heard someone hurrying behind me. I had to turn my whole body and Andriki's too to see who it was. Pinesinger caught up with me. All out of breath, she was carrying her blue-eyed baby and her pack too. I would have waited so that she could rest, but she motioned with her chin for me to go. So I did, she following.

When we had put some distance behind us, she began to talk. "I left as soon as I could gather my things," she panted. "I don't want to be their hostage. And I think they'll leave that cave now. I heard them speak of fast traveling. They want to escape our revenge."

For a time Pinesinger hurried after me in silence. Was it possible that I was going too fast for her, even with the weight of Andriki's body? When she spoke next, she was still out of breath. "It's bad about Andriki," she said. "We will grieve now. Your father, he'll grieve. All of us will miss Andriki. You most of all. How he loved you. He used to speak of you as if you were his brother or his son."

I didn't answer, because I couldn't bring myself to speak. But Pinesinger didn't want to notice my silence. As if words would make things right, she chattered desperately. "Perhaps you should have offered gifts," she said. "I believe they like horse teeth. You had some—you could have brought some. Ah well, it's too late now, and I'm not sure that gifts would have made a difference. As long as the men of your family act thoughtlessly, these things will happen to us. Even so, this is too bad."

I
HARDLY HEARD PINESINGER
. Instead of listening, I was planning to come back with Father and kill the Ilasi. If Andriki were carrying my body, he would have been planning revenge for me. Yet revenge could only happen if I lived to find Father, to tell who killed Andriki and to lead our men to the killers in their cave. Then it seemed to me that the thoughts of the Ilasi might be following the same paths. In that case, if they reasoned well, they would come after us to kill us too. So I decided to leave Andriki's body. I put him down where the trail followed the bottom of the tumbled boulders, taking time only to cover him with rocks. That's what he would have done for me, I was certain. Yet it hurt me, and as I carefully placed the rocks, I spoke to him—although by then, I knew, a bird was guiding his spirit to the west. But I told him what he needed to know—that his brothers and his in-laws and all the men of our people would be back to avenge and bury him.

Then we hurried away from the Ilasi, as they had twice hurried from us. I had to carry Pinesinger's pack for her. We didn't have much of a head start, so while Pinesinger went forward I laid false trails. We walked down a stream and broke our line of travel on wide spaces of bare rock so that our footprints seemed to vanish, as if we had flown into the air. All this took us away from the route we had used to find the Ilasi, so we spent six nights instead of five on the plain before we crossed the Hair. We had no food but berries, and at night we built no fires. We had nothing to say to each other, so we went most of the way in silence. Early on I had threatened to choke Pinesinger if her chatter didn't stop.

When the people learned of the death of Andriki, their grief and anger were very strong. Weeping, Hind took her knife to her face and breasts. Tears and blood soaked her hair and trousers. I couldn't look at her. If not for me and my wish to keep Muskrat, Andriki would still be living. The people didn't say this, but they thought it. I could feel their anger burn.

Their anger also burned at Pinesinger, who had helped to lead Andriki to his death by running away with the Ilasi, even if she had come home in the end. For a time after our return, people wouldn't answer her if she spoke. It wasn't that they scorned her, but that they didn't seem to hear her, as if they wanted to forget she was there. That, I thought, was how people felt about me too, and I all but hid myself in the shadows of the cave, so I didn't give them a chance to show me their anger.

A few days after Pinesinger and I returned, Father and the other men called me to join them at the dayfire, which they still kept at Muskrat's old camp. The men wanted to talk with me. Rather fearfully, not knowing what was in their minds, I went to them, waited a moment in case they wanted to say something quick or send me somewhere, then sat on my heels beside Father. They were going to revenge Andriki, Father told me, and they wanted me to lead them to the Ilasi. Then I was happy! "This is very good, Father. I will go with you," I said.

"Yes, my son," said Father. "You must lead us there. And you must show us where Andriki lies. We will bury him. But first you must tell us again how your woman's people killed him."

So I told them everything I knew, and I described everything I had seen about the little bird-spears. In the dust I drew one of them. With a narrow branch from our firewood, I made something like it.

"Were they like the little spear we found at Uske's Spring?" asked Father.

"They were the same," I answered.

"Where did they spear Andriki?" asked Marten.

"Once in the throat and once in the chest," I answered.

"How did the things pierce him if they were wooden?" asked Kida.

"They were pointed with bone," I said.

"Even with a bone point, this thing could not be thrown hard enough to pierce someone's skin," said Maral, taking up my copy. "How did they kill a man with a little stick like this?"

Sad to say, I had no answer. I had seen a thing I didn't understand.

***

Taking Andriki's sleeping-skin and necklace with us, we made the trip quickly, but found the cave empty and the llasi gone. They had known we would come, we reasoned, but not how many of us they would have to fight, although they could have known from Muskrat that we outnumbered them. So they would have known that when we found them, many of them would die, no matter what they threw at us. At any rate, they had left the bearskin, which told us that they had gone in a hurry. The cold, scattered ashes of their fire and the burned, mouse-gnawed bones told us that they had gone days before. But the flayed corpse of Father's wolf pup told us nothing. Why the people had killed him, we had no idea, unless they had left the corpse as a message to Father. If so, their message was wasted, and the pup too, since we didn't understand.

The llasi had hidden their tracks so well that we didn't try to follow. Instead we looked around until we found one of the broken bird-spears that I thought had killed Andriki. We looked at it as carefully as we could, fitting the broken ends together. Still we couldn't understand its strength.

Then we went back to where I had left Andriki's body, bent double from riding my shoulder. I don't like to remember finding him again so long after death. We all were unhappy and uneasy, although Father praised me for having hidden him so well. Insects had eaten him, but not animals. I had risked my life to do this for him, Father reminded the other men. We cut digging sticks for ourselves and dug a big hole. Then we found a redbush, cut strips of its slippery bark, and used it to tie Andriki's arms and legs against his body. I will always remember his hair, the only thing about him that still looked as it had in life—I remember his two yellow braids and, between them, his pale scalp showing.

When Andriki's body was ready, we lifted him into the hole, broke the string of the necklace we had brought, scattered the beads over him, and covered him with his sleeping-skin. Then we pushed the earth around him and packed it tight. We took out our knives, bared our arms, and cut ourselves so that our blood ran down on the fresh grave. "We are late, my brother," said Father, weeping. "Yet we have not forgotten you."

"Hona," said we all.

Then we covered the grave with stones so animals wouldn't dig him out. And then we went home.